Tis the season for boxes of body parts – History Blog

Earlier this month, an unidentified person or persons left a glass display case containing human remains in front of an archaeological display case at the General Directorate for Cultural Heritage in Rhineland-Palatinate (GDKE) in Speyer, Germany. The remains inside the box include skull parts, mummified legs and textile fragments.

Staff called the police, who confiscated the box. At first they thought it was a Halloween prank, but a forensic pathologist examined the remains and determined they were at least 1,000 years old. After police issued a public request for information on Oct. 23, the person who abandoned the remains and fled contacted authorities the next day. He explained that the box belonged to his mother, who is now deceased. She claims she discovered the remains decades ago in South America and brought them back to Germany. When the family was cleaning out her things, they decided it would be a mistake to just throw away the embarrassing assemblage, so they placed it in front of the GDKE’s archaeological exhibition.

I guess there’s a weird feeling to it, they obviously wanted the GDKE archaeologists to give their random body parts a new home without risking rejection, hence the secret deposit. In fact, GDKE does not actually accept body parts of unknown origin for inspection or storage. They only deal with what they find during excavations.

Discarding mummified remains and running away does not appear to be a crime, nor does possessing them. It would certainly be a criminal offense if they tried to sell them, but apparently that’s not what happened here. Police are investigating the possibility that the item was stolen from a museum or private collection before the responsible party comes forward, but have found no evidence that any such items were missing. They have now investigated the explanations they were given about the origins of the remains and found them to be credible. Police still intend to forward the report to the prosecutor’s office for review, but no charges are expected to be filed.

Coincidentally, the Rhineland-Palatinate state parliament has just passed a new law allowing people to choose their preferred form of burial. Previously, there was a legal requirement (except for religious reasons) that all deceased persons were buried or cremated in a coffin and their ashes placed in an urn for burial in a cemetery. The new law allows people to choose to take ashes home, have some of them processed into memorial pieces such as gemstones or ceramics, and scatter the ashes outside cemeteries or at designated locations along the state’s four major rivers: the Rhine, Moselle, Lahn and Saar. The body can also be covered and buried without a coffin.